Listening To Fear
by etraytin
Summary: On the best days, Mandy was ignorable. On the worst days, she was all but invisible. Some things are just inevitable.


Author's Note: So I know I've been writing a whole lot of Josh/Donna fic lately on this Fic-a-Day-Til-the-Election Spree. I just wrapped Timing, Degree and Conviction yesterday, and that one was a monster. Because of that, I've decided to give my fans what I know they've really been waiting for: a Mandy fic! :D

This one comes by way of a prompt from Anonymous (who is secretly AvengerAssembled because he cannot hide from me even by forgetting to log in), who asked "Where did Mandy go? What did she do there?" Feedback is good! Feedback makes me very happy.

…...

Mandy was the first senior staffer into the office after the shooting, but that was simply because she hadn't left in the first place. By rights she should've been there, should've been in the middle of that gaggle of senior staffers when the bullets had started flying, but the event had been such a gimme that she hadn't even bothered to go. Had hidden in her office instead because she was sulking over the fact that her coworkers didn't like her since that memo had come out. She hadn't been proud of that even when she'd made the decision, but she'd convinced herself that she'd do better work if she could manage the media from her desk phone with the televisions turned on to live coverage. Because she was doing her job, she caught it from three channels simultaneously the moment the shooting started. And she didn't have a fucking clue what to do.

She left her little temporary office in the basement and made her way up to the main floor, where a skeleton crew of staffers were glued to the televisions. Mandy recognized Leo's assistant Margaret because that red hair was unmistakable, but she had no clue who the rest of them might be. They all knew who she was, though, because they immediately clustered around her, all except Margaret who didn't leave the television. "What should we be doing, Mandy?" one of them asked.

Mandy stared at all of them. She'd come upstairs to find out what she ought to be doing. The only thing she knew how to do right now was spin. "The first thing we need is more information," she told them. "Has anybody gotten in touch with anyone who was at the Newseum?"

Now Margaret looked over, and Mandy could see she had a phone to her ear. "Nobody's answering. I got Donna and Carol, but neither of them ended up going tonight. Carol's coming in now and calling the deputy press secretaries. Donna's going to GW, but she'll call the Operations staff when she gets there."

"Okay, good start. That's a good start," Mandy nodded. "Have they said whether anyone besides the President was shot? Any of our people?"

One other other assistants clamored to answer that one. "I saw CJ and Sam on television. CJ was with the paramedics, but she was sitting up, and Sam was just walking around. On the TV it said that Zoey and Leo were both in cars, but not if they were okay or not."

Margaret made a strange, pained yelping noise as she pointed at the television. "Oh my god, it's Josh!" Mandy rushed to the screen along with anyone else, feeling a strange sense of unreality as they all tried to make sense of the grainy images. "I'd know his hair anywhere," Margaret insisted. "And there's Toby.. CJ and Sam... and there's Charlie." Mandy knew Margaret was right, Josh's hair and suit were unmistakable. He was laying on the steps outside the Newseum. Toby and CJ were both shouting inaudibly as he pressed his hands over Josh's chest and she cradled his head in her lap. Sam was guiding the paramedics, running back and forth as though that would make them bring their equipment along that much faster. In a moment, Josh was surrounded by bright yellow reflective jackets and the cameras couldn't see any more.

Mandy turned away from the television. "Okay, all of you go start calling people," she said loudly, amazed when her voice didn't crack. "I want it to look like 9am in here when the rest of the senior staff gets back in. Make sure everybody's ready for a pat-down search and whatever other kind of security they'll have on the White House right now. I'm going to work out of Jo- I'm going to work out of Sam's office until he gets back. Move, people!" The assistants scattered, even Margaret, leaving Mandy alone with the televisions. She stared at the wall of paramedics for a moment, then hurried away to Sam's office before anybody else could ask her what to do.

Things didn't get any better when the senior staff started trickling back in. Leo was back first, but he went straight into the Situation Room with the Vice-President, so there was no more than rumors of his arrival. Mandy had already been putting out fires with the press, because at least she knew how to do that much, but it was CJ who had to give the briefings and actually wrangle the reporters. And CJ was obviously concussed and probably shouldn't even have been at work, but Mandy wasn't going to be the one to tell her that because she was so damn grateful not to be in charge of the press room. Dealing with reporters was part of public relations, but not like this, not an enormous pack of them howling for red meat in the middle of an actual life-and-death crisis. This was not what Mandy had signed up for.

Toby was so distracted that he showed up in a suitcoat spattered with blood up the front and all the way down from the elbows. They stopped him at the front and Mandy had to go retrieve him and make him take off his jacket, fold back his cuffs. There was blood under his fingernails as well, all of it Josh's. Toby stared blankly at her, bloody coat over his arm, then walked with great purpose towards Leo's office for his next meeting. Mandy had to turn away and run back into Sam's office before she completely lost her composure. When Sam came back, hollow-eyed and with shaking hands, looking at Mandy as though he couldn't understand who she was or where either of them were, she retreated from the building entirely. They didn't need a media image consultant right now, the story was way out of any of their hands. Mandy drove to her real office, very carefully for once, and got incredibly drunk from the little wet bar under her desk.

She didn't go into work in the morning, and nobody called to ask where the hell she was. Instead she went to the hospital, where her security badges got her back to the ultra-special private waiting room. Charlie Young and Zoey Bartlet were there, leaning against each other and looking exhausted. They gave Mandy blank looks as she walked in, as though they could barely remember who she was or bring themselves to care. "I wanted to know how Josh is doing," she said, slicking on a layer of bravado to keep her voice from shaking. She watched their faces and wondered if it had been too much, if it seemed like she didn't even care.

"He's out of surgery," Charlie told her, one hand still stroking Zoey's hair gently, repetitively. "They fixed the tear in his artery. They're pretty sure he's going to live, but he's still mostly out of it." He didn't meet her eyes when he spoke. Mandy wondered if that was guilt, or exhaustion, or if she just didn't matter enough for him to address directly.

"I want to see him. Can I see him for just a minute?"

Charlie gave her the room number and she left them alone, listening to the noise of her own heels as she walked briskly down the hallway. Click-click-click, so sharp, so professional, a noise that didn't seem to belong in this building full of pain and trauma. Mandy almost turned back, but she couldn't find a way to excuse it to herself before she was actually at the door, so instead she pushed it open and went inside.

She thought she had the wrong room at first. The figure in the bed couldn't be Josh Lyman, not that crumpled, shrunken, mostly naked body, swathed in bandages and with tubes running in and out of him every-which-way. This was somebody's dying grandfather, this was a stranger who could be pitied from a distance. But when she looked away from the bed she saw Donna Moss curled improbably small in one of the visitor's chairs, asleep with tears dried on her face. Donna never had called the Operations staff back into work last night, which had caused a few minor glitches but not so much that anybody had really thought twice about it. There had been a lot of glitches in the last twenty-four hours.

Obviously Donna had arrived at the hospital, heard about Josh, and forgotten the rest of the world existed. Mandy wondered what it would be like to have that kind of luxury. She knew how Donna felt about Josh, had known for years now. It had never bothered her because she liked having what others envied. Josh's feelings for Donna were much more opaque, nearly as much as his feelings toward Mandy. That had come up in a few arguments towards the end, but Josh had always seemed so baffled by the idea that Mandy would feel threatened by his assistant that she'd just given up the point. Mandy wondered what was going to happen with them now, if Josh was finally going to notice his tall and wispy guardian angel. The thought was unpleasant, discomfiting, and completely inappropriate to the situation at hand.

After a quick internal talking-to, Mandy made herself move forward towards the bed, her steps quiet and halting now. Josh's face was white and slack in unconsciousness, his breath shallow and raspy, obviously assisted by the cannula in his nose. The steady beeping of the heart monitor unnerved her; its presence suggested the possibility that it might stop, and what would happen then? There were other monitors too, she could recognize blood pressure and body temperature, but most of them were beyond her ken. Charlie said he was probably going to live, but how could anybody hooked up to this many machines possibly be okay? She tried to reach down and touch his face, see if he was even still warm, but couldn't bring herself to actually press her fingers against that pale flesh. She was hovering uncertainly when a curious voice across the room said "Mandy?" and Mandy snatched her hand back as though she'd been doing something wrong.

Donna was awake now, her arms looped around her drawn-up knees, studying Mandy with exhausted interest. "I didn't hear you come in," she said on the edge of a yawn.

"Yeah," Mandy muttered, twisting her fingers together to try and stave off nervous tension. An amateur move, but since when had she cared what Donna Moss thought about her? "I figured I'd check in, see how he's doing. Has he been awake yet?"

"A little bit." Donna leaned forward, put her chin on her knees. "He's still pretty out of it. He recognizes people, understands he's in the hospital. "But he's... he's wandering. He tried to convince Sam that they needed to run poll numbers for New Hampshire." Donna hesitated, wiped her face with the back of one hand. "He called CJ Joanie."

Mandy frowned, feeling her stomach clench as she looked down at Josh's sleeping face. She hadn't realized Donna would be privy to that tidbit of information. She'd dated Josh almost six months before learning he'd had a sister. "Did you tell her what it meant?" she asked, fishing for confirmation as to how much Josh told his assistant.

"It wasn't my place," Donna said simply. "I think she was just happy it made him happy."

"Yeah," Mandy said shortly. "Are you camped out here for the duration, then?"

Donna gave her an unfathomable look. Mandy resisted the urge to shift from foot to foot like she'd been sent to the principal's office. This was a secretary, she reminded herself. "I wasn't there for him last night," Donna finally said. "I'm going to be there now." The indictment of both of them hung bold and heavy in the air.

Mandy turned away. On a better day she'd have had plenty to say about who owed whom what and why, but she was too tired to deal with this shit now. Right now she didn't even care about moral obligations or politics and nobody else did either; they were all just trying to survive from moment to moment. She stared down at the unconscious man she'd come to see, one who showed no sign whatsoever of reacting to her presence. That shouldn't have surprised her; he'd been the same way for the last six weeks they'd dated. Josh didn't break up with women so much as deliberately forget they existed until forcibly reminded. The man in the bed still didn't look like Josh. "I'm leaving," she said aloud, testing the words in her mouth. They didn't sound too bad.

"I'll tell him that you came by," Donna offered.

"Don't bother. I doubt I'll make much of a difference to his recovery," Mandy replied sourly. That was the hell of it, really. She didn't make much of a difference to anybody around here. "Good luck, Donna. Try and keep him out of trouble." She meant it, and it surprised her a little that she did.

"I'll do my best," Donna replied with a faint smile before resuming her vigil. Mandy turned and walked out, out the door, down the hall, completely bypassing the private waiting room. Click-click-click. She left out the front doors of the hospital and was mobbed by a half-dozen members of the press who recognized her instantly. It was nice to be wanted by somebody, at least. She gave them the same low-information statement everybody in the administration had been giving out all night and day, then shouldered past them to her car. She kept the top up for once, rather than risk anybody trying to hop in the passenger's seat with her.

On the way between GW and the White House, Mandy pulled off in a random parking lot and dug her phone out again. She was obviously getting old, stopping and parking before she made calls, but the hospital visit had spooked the hell out of her reptile hindbrain. Scrolling through her contacts, she found the one she wanted and called New York. "Hey, Richard, it's Mandy Hampton. Long time no chat, hey?" Yeah, I know, it was really terrible. We're all in shock down here. Listen, I'm thinking about coming back to town and I wanted to get the lay of the land from you. How does Lennox Chase feel about prodigal daughters?" She listened for a minute, smiled a little. "All right, good to know. I'll talk to you later, okay? We'll get together. Bye now."

It was a good first step, but Mandy knew she wasn't going to be able to take a deep breath again until she was on the road out of DC, the White House at her back. Until then, she had a letter to write and some packing to do. She doubted anybody would notice she was gone.


End file.
